BermaguiLetters

November 22, 2014

The Money Scam, Closing the ABC and similar

When I lived in Melbourne, then Treasurer Peter Costello and I discussed money creation - how it was created from "thin air". These days, the Americans, British and Japanese call it "Quantitative Easing". Money/Credit is created everytime you ask for a loan, or add credit to your credit card. Creating money this way should only be done as an economy expands - so that we don't run out of money. To create it recklessley causes huge problems such as house prices getting so high that many cannot afford them, and inflation which weakens our ability to purchase things. Money banks are like river banks. Money banks contain money, and river banks contain water. If we imagine house boats floating in a river, and people chained to the bottom of the river, and then we put more water into the river, the houses will float higher and higher and become unreachable by those people chained (by wages) to the bottom of the river. The people simply drown in debt. And if enough water or money is put into these banks, flooding will occur with major damage to the surrounding country. Or in many parts of the world, people die due to food prices becoming so high they can't afford the food. Another MAJOR problem is that economist Milton Friedman argued in 1970 "that a company should have no 'social responsibility' to the public or society because its only concern is to increase profits for itself and for its shareholders." In his book, Friedman writes: "There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud." The result of this is to FORCE companies to extract as much money as they possibly can from we the people to satisfy a man made law to maximise profits and ignore people and the environment. In other words, stuff the community! It is clear that that we cannot continue destroying our environment, water and seeds to satisfy profits for man made money. We actually need an environment to live in, and we cannot eat money! We need schools, roads and the ABC - as Churchill once said (paraphrasing) that the reason we fought the wars was so that we could have arts, theatre and the good things in life. Decades ago, I found an article by American lawyer Robert C. Hinkley containing a 28 word modification in the corporate law to the duty of directors designed to improve corporate behavior. He writes: "What are we waiting for? Let's change the law to reflect what the vast majority of people want, eliminating the doctrine of shareholder primacy. This can be accomplished by adding 28 words to the duty of directors to make money for shareholders,

"... but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public health or safety, the communities in which the corporation operates or the dignity of its employees."

Let's do it. Let's stop the ripoff by the corporations, councils and governments and start, once again, to live beautiful lives. And ensure that others around the world will too. I have placed this article on my website www.MakingABeautifulWorld.com/BermaguiLetters along with some charts showing how much of our major companies are owned by the big three overseas banks, JP Morgan, HSBC and Citicorp. Yours sincerely,